The chairman of Ifelodun Native Authorities in Kwara State, Hadji AbdulRasheed Yusuf, has defined why all seven council chairmen within the Kwara South senatorial district initially agreed to close their cattle markets and why the choice was later reversed.
He acknowledged that it wasn’t a mistake that the choice was taken, nor was it because of stress that it was reversed.
Dispensing his achievements on his one-year anniversary as council chairman to newspaper correspondents in Ilorin, he mentioned they took the choice after diligent investigation backed by safety findings.
Based on him, safety businesses and security-conscious people had beforehand puzzled why “kaara” (cattle markets) wouldn’t open for enterprise earlier than 12 midday and wouldn’t shut till 2 a.m.
That includes on the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Correspondents’ Chapel’s “Newkeg,” the council chief acknowledged that it was found that informants visited the markets at night time to cross data to bandits.
He acknowledged: “We shut cattle markets once we observed that informants come to the markets to alternate data with the bandits.
“That was why we shut the kaara market, and once we did that, we have been in a position to minimize the follow.
“However later, all of us agreed to reopen, however with critical monitoring. This we did by limiting actions to between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day,” he defined.
Yusuf confessed bitterly that “nearly, nearly everyone in Ifelodun has turned informant to bandits; you don’t even know whom to belief.”
Based on him, it grew to become bothersome and worrisome when safety businesses knowledgeable the council authorities that over 98 per cent of these kidnapped are Fulanis, not Yorubas.